News bits

 It's all pretty bad now. Not much positive to note in most news. Science and tech still report out some promising stuff, but the rest is mostly hellscape.

Moral rot and corruption in the USSC gets institutionalized:

A few Supreme Court justices went out of their way to fight back against enforcing the court’s new ethics rules, The New York Times reported Tuesday—and it’s not that surprising.

In a series of secret offline memos and meetings, the justices toiled away over how they would formulate their code of ethics, and—crucially—whether it could actually be enforced.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson all supported enforcement rules for the court’s code of ethics. Kagan even pitched a panel of “safe harbor” judges that justices could go to about ethics concerns. Her proposal failed to gain wider support.

Meanwhile, Justice Neil Gorsuch railed against enforcement of the ethics code, essentially arguing that not abusing his seat of power should be voluntary. One of his memos raising concerns over enforcement stretched to more than 10 pages, according to the Times.

Gorsuch warned that ethics enforcement would threaten the court’s independence, and Justice Samuel Alito echoed his concerns, the Times reported. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has failed to report that he accepted exorbitant gifts and trips from conservative megadonors such as Harlan Crow, argued that the court’s critics could not be appeased.

Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito compromised and agreed to some enforcement mechanisms—but only ones that couldn’t reasonably be enforced. Ultimately, the court decided to place no real restrictions on accepting gifts, travel, or real estate.

There we have it ethics and rule of law fans, moral rot and corruption of the USSC is legal. The argument that ethics burdens or even threatens the court is self-serving nonsense. Their arrogance and contempt for ethics and the rule of law is beyond stunning. At present, there are 11 people about 99.8% above the law, the nine USSC judges, president Bident and president-elect DJT. 

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Tariffs update: President-elect DJT announced 100% tariffs on countries that move to replace the US dollar on Saturday. In a Truth Social post, Trump took aim at “BRICS Countries” — meaning Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates — over longstanding efforts to do away with the US dollar currency. Trump demanded a “commitment” from these countries that they will “neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar.”

Ah, the distinct smell of nuanced, light touch diplomacy.

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Nervousness about democracy -- an opinion: As the drama played out in South Korea, my phone lit up with a question from friends and media colleagues — including from some of the most sober-minded people I know. Can this happen here? Can an American president — or any other American leader — create a similar political emergency? The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes — if a president (or a governor) exploits ambiguities in American law. .... there is a statutory basis for military intervention in domestic affairs, and the statute — called the Insurrection Act — is so poorly drafted that I have come to call it America’s most dangerous law. The Insurrection Act is almost as old as the United States itself. The law dates to 1792, and it permits the president to deploy American troops on American streets to impose order and maintain government control.

Remember, DJT wanted to call out the troops and shoot protesters. There is no evidence I am aware of that he feels differently today. But I am aware of some reporting that says DJT is chomping at the bit to us the US military to obliterate protesters in the US. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and combat veteran is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold. Throughout this latest presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly warned Americans about “the enemy within,” an amorphous collection of left-wing ideologues whom he said pose a greater danger to the country than Russia or China. Sometimes he spoke broadly of “radical left lunatics” and “very smart, very vicious people.”

“America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth asserts in the book, which was published in June. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals.” While his generation was fighting wars abroad, Hegseth writes, “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.”

What? Me worry?? Nah, it's all good. But I do agree that we are in a cold civil war. Unfortunately we're losing.

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Tax policy for the wealthy: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes -- 

The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated. 

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is the 10th-richest person in the United States, worth $127 billion. In theory, when he dies, his estate should pay 40 percent of his net worth to the government in taxes.

But Mr. Huang, 61, is not only an engineering genius and Silicon Valley icon whose company, the world’s second-most valuable, makes the chips that power much artificial intelligence. He is also the beneficiary of a series of tax dodges that will enable him to pass on much of his fortune tax free, according to securities and tax filings reviewed by The New York Times.  

Revenue from the tax has barely changed since 2000, even as the wealth of the richest Americans has roughly quadrupled. If the estate tax had simply kept pace, it would have raised around $120 billion last year. Instead it brought in about a quarter of that.

Tax avoidance is using legal ways to reduce taxes. Tax evasion is illegal withholding of taxes that are owed. Officially, current tax evasion amounts to about $495 billion/year. My estimate is that it amounts to at least about $1 trillion/year. 

However, with new ways to use new tax avoidance laws, wealthy people don't need to resort to tax evasion and the embarrassment and inconvenience of felony convictions. That is what our failed two-party, pay-to-play tax system has done for the rich and powerful. Well, since they bought and paid to legalize tax evasion, why not use tax avoidance to steer clear of the law? Inconvenient felony convictions for tax evasion will soon be a bad memory of the past, just like that brief spasm of effort to get our morally rotted, failed USSC to operate honestly and ethically.

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I deleted my Bluesky account. The interest there was zero. But, it was an informative experiment in social media. I learned that social media like that is not suitable for serious politics.